The article is an interesting perspective on the factor of choices given in "opinion" polls. Forcing a choice one way or another has a really interesting effect (as in including only agree/disagree, and no "I don't know" option). It can force individuals to take a stance on a parent topic, even if that parent topic is implicit (for example "do you trust the government" for conspiracy theories).
It reminds me a little of forced choice assesments [0], commonly used for interview screening or employee assesment. Its interesting, but kind of inevitable, that people will often default to the choice which is "best" rather than most accurate/correct. Forcing a choice can have all sorts of effects, and it depends on the context if that effect is good or not.
Also important is the order and method in which the choices are presented. Are respondents told at every question that they have "not sure" as an option? Is it the first option presented?
Order and medhod. Such an easy game to play, I'm sure there are much more subtle and effective ways of doing that the example I'm about to dash off here. We will only report the stats for the answers of question 3.
Questionaire A.
1. Do you think Osama Bin Laden is evil?
2. Do you support Bin Laden being brought to justice for his actions?
My takeaway is that as a heuristic, I can dismiss claims of "x% of Y group believe Z" as meaningful when
- x ~ 4% if the question offered an "unsure/ don't know" option, or
- x ~ 33% if the question did not offer an "unsure/don't know" option.
Do think as a populace we'll ever get beyond the inherent subjectivity of poll results? A NYT article yesterday, "Young People More Likely to Believe Virus Misinformation, Study Says" [1], cited that 28% of 18-24 y.o.s believe that humans originally got coronavirus from eating bats. But I looked at the paper [2], and it turns out they were offered a "not sure" option. So am I justified now in thinking that there's something wrong with these Gen Z kids? I think most likely not...
> 28% of 18-24 y.o.s believe that humans originally got coronavirus from eating bats
Doesn't that simply mean they are a few months behind on the news of the origins of coronavirus? The main theory used to be that, and the topic is irrelevant enough to people that it's unrealistic to expect them to be updated all the time.
> 28% of 18-24 y.o.s believe that humans originally got coronavirus from eating bats
In fact, bats are still the leading theory.
According to Wikipedia: While there is scientific consensus that bats are the ultimate source of coronaviruses, it is hypothesized that a SARS-CoV-2-like coronavirus originated in pangolins, jumped back to bats, and then jumped to humans, resulting in SARS-CoV-2. [...] Therefore, based on maximum parsimony, a specific population of bats is more likely to have directly transmitted SARS-CoV-2 to humans than a pangolin.
Though it doesn't mention "eating" specifically, I imagine that transmission could happen from butchering a bat in preparation for consumption, handling of bat remains, or being bitten by a bat.
So what's up with the New York Times[2] and that study[3]? Are they really picking bones over the word "eating"? Is there a new leading theory that no one bothered to add to Wikipedia?
There isn't one. It's still believed to come from an animal host and there's a strain of bat coronavirus that is very close and bats are eaten in parts of China. The notion that bats harvested for food lead to human infection is unproven, but still plausible. And we don't really have a better story yet.
Could you elaborate on why it's sad? I'd like to know the answer. I always knew the bat-soup hypothesis was little more than guesswork, but I never got the news of a more recent, more accepted hypothesis with solid evidence. Is there one?
The context of the NYT article seems to be that the bat-eating theory is now classified as “misinformation” by the NYT. This is confusing to me because that theory was widely discussed in the early months of the pandemic; implicitly classifying it as “misinformation” implies that it’s been discredited. That alone is news to me. The primary alternative to this theory, which I’ve definitely seen classified as “misinformation”, would be that the virus somehow escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
By “official theory” I meant the narrative that NYT and similar establishments are going with now. Infer from that what you will.
I think the parent was saying it’s a reasonable thing to ask. What’s sad is that there is so much misinformation out there, and most of us are only familiar with the speculations of politicians and pundits with no scientific basis.
And “official” seems to have lost a lot of its meaning in recent times.
I am not the original poster, but I think the problem is "official theory" implies that a theory from experts is one to be skeptical of. When I was a kid, lots of people had bumper stickers that said "Question Authority." That makes sense in a free society. But we have learned that in matters of public safety, everyone coming up with their own idea of what is safe and healthy is probably not as good of an idea as everyone doing what experts recommend, even knowing that the experts or the consensus is sometimes wrong or partly wrong.
People ask me, if there is a vaccine for COVID-19 would you take it right away, or wait, or not take it? My answer is that I am going to do what my doctor recommends. I still question authority. But I have learned that there are limits to my knowledge and judgement that aren't always obvious to me.
In any other time we wait in the dark huddled around our AM radios to hear if they've figured this thing out. Or we close the city gates and start burning witches. Or we burn animals on the altar to Yahweh and Ashera.
It's unusual that we get to see the bleeding edge science before it's all figured out, and it's definitely making things confusing, but it isn't sad.
believe that humans originally got coronavirus from eating bats
And what are we supposed to conclude from that fact? Someone heard that coronavirus is bat-related, it's not completely unreasonable to assume that it made the jump to humans when someone prepared one for eating.
Yes this doesn't seem like an issue about misinformation, but rather about making a reasonable inference when knowing only a subset of relevant information (they probably remember that coronavirus originated from bats, and early on a wildlife market was suspected as the source of the outbreak and think based on this that people got infected by eating bats).
Perhaps the takeaway should be that these sorts of studies need a control group. Now it may be difficult to find a population that would be good to serve as a control group, which I think points toward the idea that these sort of studies should be used to examine the differences between groups, rather than to make claims about any group in absolute terms.
I also think that studies of the form "people who disagree with me are stupid because they think X" are fundamentally dumb. This particular issue is just a small part of why I think that.
-11% of the population would not disagree with a ridiculous claim (4% agree + 7% unsure)
-2 to 1 people when given a somewhat plausible event they have never heard of would be inclined to think its more likely false than true.
My main takeaway though is getting people's beliefs through polls is hard and you probably need to carefully craft multiple questions phrased in different ways while trying to avoid showing your bias to get a "true" result.
A good chunk of those aren't necessarily false claims, just ones that haven't been proven true. The study is misinforming us about the misinformation, and NYT is misinforming us about that.
Maybe it was bats. Seems like the jury is still out on that one. Even if it's wrong, I think Gen Z's could be forgiven for conflating it with Ebola in the origin story. Mind you, most of them are going to say "bats? I don't know, let me look that up" in real life. In a survey you have to go with "uhh, I do remember hearing something about a deadly virus that came from eating bats..."
All of the ‘fake news’ discussion seems to be missing the forest for the trees. It also seems to be woefully unfamiliar with post-modern philosophy, e.g. Baudrillard.
The reality is we probably aren’t going back to a world with a predominate narrative. Contrary to the mainstream story, conspiracies aren’t just something stupid people latch on to. They often hide metaphorical truths, even if the actual details are exaggerated or false. This should be obvious to anyone paying attention to events in the past decade, e.g. Epstein. Combined with information overload, technological advancements like A.I. commenting and deepfakes, and political-financial incentives to frame events in biased ways, I expect the situation to only fracture more.
The only semi-solution, in my mind, would be a radically transparent nonprofit that is held to rigorous standards and isn’t dependent on advertising for income. It’s beyond me why the billionaire class hasn’t chipped in a few bucks to save the journalistic concept of truth - unless of course, they have no reason to.
The billionaire class in countries based on export of natural resources do not depend on a well-educated and civically competent citizenry. For example, in Russia only some 10 million people are needed to run the oil-and-gas economy, and the whole rest of the country has been termed "superfluous population" by some commentators. So, why would billionaires be interested in helping the average person out?
Well, the presumption is that some billionaires, in the West at least, have a minor interest in maintaining basic standards of civilization. A tall order, no doubt, but one can hope. Bezos seems content to push his biased viewpoint via WaPo, but one hopes that others are more civic-minded.
A major contribution by the billionaire class against journalism was the murder of Kashoggi. The unsolved car bomb that killed the Panama papers journalist was probably also sponsored by someone very well off.
Who are they held to rigorous standards by? There would need to be a another pure body to hold them to task, and so on indefinitely.
If billionaires were controlling the purse strings, it seems unlikely they would be as willing to report negatively on them or their businesses either.
I'm unconvinced there is any way to deliver reasonably unbiased 'truth' journalistically
Plenty of industries manage to self-regulate to an acceptable degree.
And my idea was more: get anonymous donors to put $10 billion in an untouchable trust that funds a nonprofit news source, which is itself policed and funded by a separate anonymous trust. Full public transparency for everything. The legal mechanisms are available, even if the decency isn’t.
>The only semi-solution, in my mind, would be a radically transparent nonprofit that is held to rigorous standards and isn’t dependent on advertising for income.
Why is the only solution a centralized one, for you?
I’m not committed to a centralized one, it just seemed like the best initial solution. Are you familiar with distributed solutions to squishy problems like journalistic truth? I don’t know any offhand.
Proper education (whether inside the family household or outside)? Critical thinking? Personal accountability? There might not be a need for one or more guaranteed sources like you describe.
Much of the problem is memes shared by older people on Facebook who are 30+ years out of any kind of formal education, so even if we had an education magic wand the lead time is enormous, well into the "climate change has been decided one way or the other" era.
> Personal accountability?
What on earth does this look like? Going up to random punters buying the Sun, grabbing them by the lapels and asking "why are you reading this propaganda?"
Of course those things are also needed, but that wasn’t really what my comment is talking about. Nor are they mutually exclusive.
The issue I’m referring to is at the institutional level, not the individual one. As far as I’m concerned, when anyone with critical thinking skills analyzes the media, it all looks like propaganda. That doesn’t really help society get more accurate information.
Not to split hairs, you started out suggesting that the world is destined toward a future where an institutional source of journalistic truth no longer exists. Then you propose how to force one back in. More interesting to me is, how to live better in a world without one?
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this myself, but to save the long explanation for another time, I’ll just say: I don’t think there is a solution, other than localism, or a highly transparent and rigorous centralized institution. The closer you are to a community and information, the better you can judge it for yourself. Not to mention the fact that most global news isn’t particularly relevant for most people.
Historically, if you wanted good information, you paid for it. Whether that was a king's intelligence network, or a peasant's daily paper. However in today's world the consumers of media are not paying for it. The advertisers are. So we end up with incentives that lean away from journalistic truth. Could it be that simple?
If you want good information, you can still pay for it. Nation-states do this. Hedge funds do this. There is more data available on the open market than ever before. But the buy-side of that market has shifted considerably.
Let's not also forget that there are a substantial number of conspiracy (or crackpot) theories are true, like MKULTRA's existence, Tuskeegee Siphilis experiments, Government experimentation on populations (radioactive tracers over wichita, and red yeast over san francisco), politically orchestrated break-in and theft of DNC information (twice!), using a polio vaccination program as a front for CIA surveillance, black sites and extrajudicial renditions, etc etc etc...
Maybe this is an unnecessary comment but I think this was uninsightful for SSC. It's impossible to divorce some of the conspiracies from political alignment so I'm surprised he's willing to try to make a case for that; and if he wasn't doing that the perfunctory attempt at connecting this to a broader point about false belief and how it is acquired and retained failed.
In the article before this one he more or less intimates that it's not necessary to publicly refute false heterodox belief (creationism/ID). W T F? He also ignores, or doesn't include the reasons why it became such a huge topic in the 2000s: bush's presidency.
People distrust media so much that "believe the oppositte of what media says" seems like a reasonable heuristic to them. You need to take that into account.
Some may take that to the extreme of "believe the opposite of anything that sounds like what media would say"
When I first saw this I was somewhat confused. I was wondering whether Slate Star Codex was back, but I hadn't seen any announcement. When I scrolled down to the bottom I saw that this post was from May 28, 2020. So Slate Star Codex is not back (yet?). (Sad Face.)
> In the same way, maybe we can posit a North Dakota constant of 33%. This is how many people believe in conspiracy theories when there’s no reason at all to believe them, not even the flimsy reasons conspiracy theories usually provide.
I think that's the wrong conclusion.
What the statistic in question suggests is far narrower. That, when specifically directed not to seek out other information, about 1/3 of people will assume Alex Jones is telling the truth about an issue, while 2/3 will assume he is lying.
I don't think generalizing that to level of belief in conspiracy theories is valid; while I suppose one might assume that the "North Dakota crash" refers to a conspiracy theory, the explicit question refers to whether Alex Jones is lying, so the personal credibility of that source is definitely being tested in the question (and without any actual story for respondents to evaluate, its the only thing that the question can be testing.)
If you look closely at the Chapman survey, though, it didn't mention Alex Jones; the reported statistics were based on a survey without that particular priming. The only mention of Alex Jones is a hypothetical example from Scott, which was not part of the survey, and the 33% is just
> Respondents to the Chapman University Survey of American Fears were asked if “The government is concealing what they know about…the North Dakota crash.” A third of Americans (33%) think the government is concealing information about this invented event.
Edit: I guess this phrasing (for each conspiracy) actually would be satisfied by the existence of any classified information about each topic, even classified information that wouldn't materially change the public's impression of the event. It's almost certainly true that "the government is concealing what they know about" the 9/11 attacks and the JFK assassination, for example, because there are some files and documents related to those matters that the government won't release publicly, which isn't the same as saying that those files and documents would change anyone's assessment of who is responsible for those events.
> Edit: I guess this phrasing (for each conspiracy) actually would be satisfied by the existence of any classified information about each topic, even classified information that wouldn't materially change the public's impression of the event. It's almost certainly true that "the government is concealing what they know about" the 9/11 attacks and the JFK assassination, for example, because there are some files and documents related to those matters that the government won't release publicly, which isn't the same as saying that those files and documents would change anyone's assessment of who is responsible for those events.
That's my problem with the way the Chapman survey was worded. The prompt was overly broad. Answering "yes" for some of those "conspiracies" is reasonable, not an indication of conspiratorial thinking. It does, however, provide an upper bound for such thinking since a person who believes in conspiracies about those things (or are just general "black helicopter" types) are not going to answer in the negative (unless they think the poll is part of a secret government plot to out them...).
It seems like if a source you expect to be trustworthy asks if there has been a cover up of something you have never heard of, the fact that you have never heard of it is a prior for there being a cover up!
It’s not evidence, though, is it? It’s just a reflection of your prior information state that influences the truth value you assign to the new proposition in the absence of evidence.
That is a prior.
There can’t be evidence of the cover up since the cover up is actually fictional.
> There can't be evidence of the cover up since the cover up is actually fictional.
That's "proof", not "evidence". If you see someone holding a bloody knife, that's evidence in favor of them having killed someone, even if turns that they didn't (and thus that the evidence was misleading).
Your prior would be the truth value you assign without knowing whether you've heard about the supposedly-covered-up thing. (Which is admittedly a hard epistemic state to be in for a significant length of time. Eg, compare: what is your prior that this question has a odd number of letters in it? Obviously about 0.5, but it's trivial to count them and force your epistemic state to near 0 or 1.)
A prior is not based on ignorance of your own knowledge.
My prior about the number of letters
in the question is based on what I do know about what I don’t know.
I know nobody has told me. I know the letters are not alternating in color. I know the letters are not in a grid. I know there are more letters than a quick visual would allow me to count - e.g. more than 8, etc.
it is widely believed that environmental factors in modern society are giving people depressive symptoms -- ranging from low-mood to dysthymia to full clinical depression.
i am willing to speculate that the same may be true of psychosis. i'm not an expert or anything but what is true of depressive symptoms seems like it could be true of psychotic symptoms as well.
many people may be suffering from very low-grade, subclinical psychotic symptoms, with a smaller number progressing to diagnosable mental illness.
this idea is consonant with findings that schizophrenia diagnoses increase for people who live in cities, and with the social defeat hypothesis.
it seems to me that this would explain the increase in the past few years in the particularly bizarre kind of conspiratorial thinking described here.
old-fashioned conspiracies (JFK, UFOs) had a kind of internal coherence and logic that seems to have gone away -- if you look at conspiracy stuff nowadays, conspiracy theorists don't even try to make sense any more. it's a style of thinking that really seems like it must the result of some kind of difference in mental processes.
The floor is certainly lower than 33%. For example, here is another poll by the same firm showing only 16% total acceptance of "- The Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, CT was a hoax spread by people who want to impose strict gun control laws.", and only 12% among Trump voters (6% for Clinton voters).
In Neal Stephenson's most recent novel, Fall, a plot element is what could be described as a fake disaster which transforms into an ongoing dispute over who caused the (fake) disaster, and why the government is trying to cover up the (fake) disaster, and so on. Basically, the Moab event becomes a culture war touchstone, much like the child trafficking ring in the basement of a pizza restaurant. "Remember Moab" is the bumper stick version of this.
I would have liked to see Pizzagate compared to the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump was Vladimr Putin's sleeper agent, and that his campaign worked hand-in-hand with the Russians to steal the 2016 election. More than a few people believed that.
I don't think reasonable people are asserting that Trump is a sleeper agent.
What reasonable people are saying is that Trump is an authoritarian, a person who admires other strongmen, a person who has had business relationships with Russia and has no problems with vehement conflicts of interests, and that there have been substantial reports of Russians creating political connections with people in the Republican party and various think tanks.
That's not necessarily a conspiracy, nor is it an idea of a "grand plan" to steal elections. Connections for the sake of influence and personal relationships have played part in politics since forever, and does not require conspiracist thinking to assert than and to assert certain factual evidence that suggests people are putting personal and party interests over that of national security.
With Jefferey Epstein having been outed and arrested, and given all of his well known connections in industry, academia, and politics, is it still controversial to say that there might be pedophilia within the ranks of government?
> that there might be pedophilia within the ranks of government
What does that mean?
Like just based on the size of government... someone is probably a pedophile. But I don't know what that means other than there is a lot of people in government.
Beyond that "that there might be pedophilia within the ranks of government" seems too vague.
That's not what QAnon is saying though. We've seen instances of government officials involved with pedophilia before, but QAnon and the pizzagate stuff is more precisely positing that not only is there pedophilia, but it's a highly coordinated effort within the government - and yes, that is controversial.
> is it still controversial to say that there might be pedophilia within the ranks of government?
No, actual specific public officers have been arrested and convicted of child sex crimes.
There's a difference between belief that the Pizzagate conspiracy theory is true, and belief that there might (or even the stronger belief that there absolutely is) "pedophilia within the ranks of the government".
One is a very specific conspiracy theory, and one is a belief that a phenomenon which is present throughout humanity and which, like most things, is enabled by positions of power is not somehow magically completely excluded from government. (So, in a sense, an anti-conspiracy theory.)
I'm sure if you surveyed people who believe in the "conspiracy" you would find opinions much more nuanced and not necessarily in complete agreement with it, like with anything. But of course the media likes to paint them with a broad brush, because it's easier than actually doing investigative journalism, and the pollsters get similar results, because they're not looking for nuance, they're looking to take a position and use statistics to justify it.
Yes, it's controversial. Trump says he never met the guy, nevermind the photo of them together. I don't follow QAnon, but if I was Q, I'd spin that picture as proof that Trump was investigating the pedo ring.
It reminds me a little of forced choice assesments [0], commonly used for interview screening or employee assesment. Its interesting, but kind of inevitable, that people will often default to the choice which is "best" rather than most accurate/correct. Forcing a choice can have all sorts of effects, and it depends on the context if that effect is good or not.
[0] https://methods.sagepub.com/reference/the-sage-encyclopedia-...